Hey dad, it's me again
by minimonster12345
Summary: "Stop it Thalia." She told herself as she opened her eyes. "You're being stupid." The dad she thought she had had been a figment of her imagination, created by her younger self to make her feel loved. Like an imaginary friend. She knew Zeus wasn't the man she had talked to every day for the longest time. He couldn't be. Sequel to 'Hi Dad'


**HHHHHIIIIIII guys! So, I really enjoyed writing Hi Dad, and I love writing in the way it was written, so I decided to make the sequel. This is probably the most angsty story I've written. Enjoy!**

Thalia sat in her tent, her eyelids drooping, her body shaking, and a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach. She looked around at the sleeping huntresses around her. She couldn't wake them up, that would be rude. They deserved to sleep.

It's not like they would understand anyway. Nobody would understand, the way she felt was stupid. She needed to stop pitying herself, she needed to lie down and try to sleep. She was overreacting.

But that wasn't true, and she knew that. She just needed something to blame it on, like loss of sleep or normal human nature. It wasn't that simple.

One of the girls muttered in her sleep and Thalia jumped. It was Kelly, one of the youngest hunters of Artemis. She just joined a couple days ago when she turned nine. She tried to imagine what Kelly's reaction would be if she woke up and saw Thalia, the girl she looked up to for orders, with her wrists bleeding and a knife in her hand.

She looked around again. Any of them could wake up at any minute. Taking a deep breath, she crawled out of the tent and sat in the grass. She wiped the blood off her arm, which didn't help much. Her arm was still bleeding.

She knew she should eat some ambrosia or drink some nectar, but she didn't want to go back to being numb. She couldn't.

Her eyes burned. She hadn't slept in two days. She could tell Artemis was getting suspicious, but she didn't say anything.

She was a mess, really. She had dark circles around her bloodshot eyes, whenever she went hunting with Lady Artemis she trudged behind everyone trying to keep up, and she always wore baggy sweatshirts that covered her arms. She just looked terrible over all.

Pulling her knees to her chest, her eyes wander to the sky. It's clear of clouds, the stars sparkling as she closes her eyes, relieving the pain in her eyes.

She wanted to cry, but she couldn't. All she could do was wallow in the pain.

She shivers, the wind biting at her skin. She couldn't grasp how she felt, couldn't explain it to herself. She was worried, scared, sad, and numb at the same time. It made no sense.

She needed help, she needed someone to talk to. She couldn't talk to Artemis or the huntresses, they wouldn't understand. Jason was fighting in the war, her baby brother was fighting and could die at any moment, who was she to put more stress on him? She wouldn't be able to handle the guilt of worrying him with her petty problems when he had enough on his plate already.

She scoffed as she thought of someone else.

Sure, she had 'prayed' to her dad before, but she was young then, and he never actually listened to her. If he had, he would've done something. Unless he didn't care. He probably didn't.

But… it couldn't hurt to… try, could it?

"Stop it Thalia." She told herself as she opened her eyes. "You're being stupid."

The dad she thought she had had been a figment of her imagination, created by her younger self to make her feel loved. Like an imaginary friend.

She knew Zeus wasn't the man she had talked to every day for the longest time. He couldn't be.

She still had the journal that she wrote everything in, she even wrote in it sometimes, but she laughed at herself for ever getting so excited to talk to someone that wasn't real.

Her arm had stopped bleeding and had started to sting, adding more pain to her worn down body.

She couldn't stop thinking about it. Her dad didn't care about her, but she didn't seem to mind pretending before. Why can't she pretend now?

"Dad?"

There was no turning back now.

"I-I know I haven't done this in a while… a long while, but I… I don't have anyone else to talk to. I need help."

Saying it felt surprisingly good, like weights lifted off of her shoulders.

"I don't know what to do, dad."

She almost called him daddy but she stopped herself.

"I started cutting myself again a couple weeks ago."

She ached. She wanted to vent, to tell this fake father that she wasn't okay and that she didn't think she could ever be okay. Suddenly, she understood her eleven year old self again.

"Dad, sometimes I wish you never turned me into a tree. I wish I died. It's not like anybody would care anyway."

Clouds had started to move over the area that the hunters were staying.

"I know you're not listening. I was stupid for ever having hope that you were."

She pulled her sleeves down, her arms still stinging.

"Daddy…."

She realizes her slip-up.

"Dad, I'm worried about Jason. I don't want him to get hurt. He's my little brother."

"So… if by any chance you do happen to be listening… maybe you could, keep him safe? I don't want him to die. I don't know what I would do if he died."

The comforting silence had taken over again. The wind howled and the cold nipped at her face as she lay there staring at the sky.

"Thanks dad. Goodnight."

Thalia went back into the tent and slept peacefully that night, even though it was only for three hours.

**Three weeks later **

Everything started getting fuzzy in Thalia's head. She couldn't concentrate on things and she was always on the verge of passing out. She was pretty sure Artemis was gonna say something any day now.

She would forget names and dates and almost everything. By now she looked dead and didn't try to cover it up anymore.

She didn't try to stop herself from plummeting to rock bottom. She avoided sleep as much as she could, the nightmares killed her inside. When she did sleep, it was usually only once every three days for two or three hours, maybe four if she was having a good night. It wasn't like she had a hard time avoiding sleep, whenever she slept she would wake up constantly, and when she tried to sleep she couldn't. She just lied awake at night.

She started eating less again. Once in a while she would completely lose her appetite and not eat for an entire day. She always felt sick and ate very little because of it. She got thinner every day, losing more strength than she had already lost.

Her arms would barely bend without aching and stinging. They were full of scars and cuts, making it hard for her to use her arms for most things. She would try to hold in a yelp whenever someone touched her arm, and wore sweatshirts all the time to hide them.

She just got weaker and weaker, and every time she looked at her reflection she felt like screaming. The feelings she had never went away, and she didn't have any other way to escape. She was trapped.

She feared that Jason would IM her. She didn't want him seeing her like this. At all. She secluded herself from the other huntresses, acting more as a pet than a lieutenant. She didn't deserve the silver headband she wore every day. She didn't deserve anything.

She kept thinking that Artemis would make her leave the hunt, but Artemis didn't even address the situation, other than shooting Thalia concerned looks.

She would pray to her dad every night. She prayed for Jason to be healthy and safe, along with the rest of the seven, she prayed for camp to stay safe, she prayed for the rest of the huntresses, but she never prayed for herself. She never asked for help even though she knew she needed it.

She managed to convince herself she didn't deserve help, that she couldn't burden other people with her problems, especially since there was so much drama going on with the war.

But every once in a while that one happy feeling would come back. That feeling that Zeus heard her, that he was trying to help her. That was the thing that motivated her to eat, to sleep, to not hurt herself.

It only ever lasted a day at most. She would just go back to calling herself stupid for thinking he cared about her in the slightest.

He couldn't love her. How could he ever love her? She would always be the angsty daughter that annoyed him by blabbing about all her problems.

Her brain would go back and forth between the two options, in a sort of 'he loves me, he loves me not' way, and she could never make up her mind. That was the way it was for most things, actually. She was indecisive about everything, probably because of the emotions fighting for domination in her head.

Pain was all she felt. Ever. No matter what. She was always in pain, physically and emotionally. It had taken over her life.

Every once in a while she would find herself sitting outside late at night, when the sky was dark and the stars were shining bright.

She always tried to talk to her dad, but her brain was a jumbled mess. What would she tell him first?

There was no way to even describe how she felt. It was beyond sad, beyond scared. It was like every negative emotion you could ever feel, all shoved inside of a girl. A lonely, secluded, trapped, innocent girl with no guidance.

But nobody knew what that felt like. Nobody but Thalia. She needed a way to cope. She needed a strength no longer had. A strength that was taken away from her a long time ago. She needed confidence.

Confidence. Something Thalia used to have a lot of. She could saunter around and make witty remarks and be rude to whoever she wanted to, but she's been turned into somebody who can barely even speak without hurting more.

And there that fragile, broken Thalia stood, outside her tent with nothing else on her mind but to get rid of herself forever.

She could only die in battle, but she had been at battle with herself for longer than she could remember. Did that count? Thalia didn't know, but she couldn't stop herself from wanting to try. And try she was going to do.

So she got her knife and she tried. She tried as hard as she could. And as she was trying, she talked. She talked to the one person she could trust to not tell anyone. She told the creator of her confused mind.

"Dad? I'm sorry. I have to go."

She couldn't think straight anymore, it was all blurring. The scarlet on her hands, the throbbing in her head from sleep deprivation, the aches of her misery aged limbs.

"I love you. Please don't miss me. I'm so sorry I burdened you with my life. I'm sorry."

She meant it, or she thought she meant it. She couldn't even tell anymore.

"Please protect my baby brother, tell him I love him to pieces and that he shouldn't miss me either."

Her arm was covered in scarlet now and she lost the energy to continue numbing her arms.

"Tell Artemis that Phoebe would make a great lieutenant. She's been wanting to be lieutenant, I can tell. She deserves it more than me."

It's not like Thalia was a good lieutenant anyway. Not now.

"And dad, thanks for listening to me. I appreciate it. Goodnight daddy."

She closed her eyes as the sting dulled. Everything went black.

But Thalia wasn't gone. There was a flash of light behind her eyes and the next thing she remembered was waking up a couple minutes later. Her head was still throbbing, her bones still ached, those evil emotions still burned inside of her, and her clothes were stained the color scarlet, but there were no hints of any fresh cuts on her arms and she wasn't bleeding.

Thalia went back in her tent, changed her clothes, and never spoke of what happened that night to anyone.

**One and a half weeks later**

Thalia had been slightly freaked out since the incident happened, but it also gave her a strange feeling of hope, that would momentarily take control over the other feelings every once in a while.

She'd been talking to Zeus every night since then, but the talks didn't last as long as they did before. She would usually say hi, and tell him what she did that day with the hunt, then say goodnight. Maybe it was because for the first time in a long time, she was actually considering that her dad is actually listening to her when she talks to him.

I mean, did the god of the skies really sit and listen to his demigod daughter talk about her problems? Or maybe he just happened to hear her that certain time, the time she would've least liked him to hear her.

But ever since then she started eating just a little bit more and she started sleeping every day for a couple hours even though she was having nightmares. She felt a little bit less scared now. She also tried to not give in to the urge to hurt herself as much as she could. She hadn't succeeded much in that, but she was trying.

She felt eleven years old again as she waited for the day to end to tell Zeus some very important news. Well, it was important to her, at least.

After she knew everyone had fallen asleep, she crawled out of the tent and sat down in a spot of grass, looking up.

"Hi dad. Um, well, I have something to tell you. I haven't cut in three days."

Saying it out loud, she sounded like a little kid showing their parent a drawing they made.

"That's the longest I've gone in a while. I-I know it sounds a little bit pathetic… but I'm kind of proud. I want to thank you. You know, if you did something when the… thing happened. If that was you… I hope you're not disappointed in me. I mean, I understand if you are, but…."

She couldn't think of any words to say.

"Look, I'm actually not that sorry about what I did. But I am thankful for you. I-I guess I wasn't thinking completely straight. People need me, I know what now. I couldn't do that to Jason, or Lady Artemis, or any of the huntresses, or any of my friends. I couldn't put that pressure on them, I care about them too much."

She lied back on the grass, still looking up.

"I had and okay day today. I did some hunting, but not much. Lady Artemis told me to stay by the tents with some of the newer girls. I had a bad headache."

She could hear crickets and owls and other animals walking around.

"I know you might not be listening, but if you are… thanks. Goodnight dad."

Thalia thought that she might be crazy. Talking to a god that probably wasn't even listening.

But he _was_ listening. Zeus heard every word she'd ever said to him since the first time she'd prayed to him. He smiled when she was excited to tell him stuff and he frowned when she was having a bad day. Even when she doubted him, he listened. Even when things got hard he always listened. Because there was no better way to help Thalia Grace then to be someone that would listen.

**Okay guys, I really hope you liked it! Please review! BBBBYYYYEEE!**


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